Posts Tagged ‘help’

I consider myself a nice person. I smile alot and I speak to people respectfully. I also tend to distance myself from sour negative people. Unkind people, mean-spirited people who always have something desparaging to say. This aversion is why this issue is such a kill-switch between myself and my husband. He becomes all those things when he goes through his moods. All of them and it makes me crazy. After years of trying to push him out of his moods. After years and finally realizing it was not pressure from work, or tiredness or frustration. After years of realizing that there was no way to stop it except to wait. I just became fed up. It felt like I lived on rollercoaster ride. Dealing with the plunging, heartwrenching, nerve stripping down turns for the uplifting, euphoric exciting upturns only to go down once again.

I began to see there were no more excuses to make when he lost his job. There was no more work as a pressure and issue. He stayed in alot and the moods were still there, but worse than my frustration with his mood was his missing some of his prayers. Not that he wouldnt pray, but he did not want to go out to the masjid. He would be asleep and not be wakeable, he would ask for food right before the athan and stay in to eat or sometimes he would just establish the prayer at home with no excuse, ignoring my claims that the man must pray all of his salat in the masjid.

Ramadhan is just around the corner and I am already having anxiety attacks about the arguments we will have and the tension there will be because he doesn’t want to go to tarawih or stay at the masjid. Sometimes we will go and later the kids and I will find him asleep in the car. Sometimes he doesn’t want to listen to a lecture or read quran with us when he is having his mood swing. I don’t understand how you can be in crisis and not do things to get closer to Allah. What he will do is stay up all night and day playing video games. All night and day with little sleep for days. I am so feed up. I am really considering divorce at this point.

I just wanted to start out by saying barakallahu feekum for all the kind words and du’as I’ve received. I see them all and I am not replying on purpose because I have to get this off of my chest. I don’t want to be distracted by the finer details or lengthy side explanations before I have just let it all out of my system. I’ve always been a private person, never discussing my private life, my marriage or what goes on with my family with others. When I found this blog, I saw an opportunity to vent about those things that weighed heavily on my conscience, my struggles, my problems, without dishonoring my husband or my loved ones.

I never had anyone I could discuss this issue with. I always felt that people would be judgemental or look down on him for being flawed or me for being shallow and impatient. It has gone on too long and now and I feel like shaitan has me confused. I feel like the lone sheep left to the marauding wolf. I feel safe here amongst anonymous friends. Safe enough to bring things I feel to the light and get the perspective I need to move forward. Like polygyny, I’m sure I’m not the only one who has been through or is going through this. Maybe my affair will give someone else the courage to face reality and get help. I pray for the good and Allah’s guidance for us all.

I don’t know how long I’ve known or how long I’ve pretended not to know the truth. It always lay underneath my thoughts, purposely shoved to the side, shoved down, away from my conscious mind. I just did not want to deal with what the truth could mean. To me and the family I’ve worked so hard to build and support. The truth is I’ve always known the truth.

The truth is, my husband is mentally ill and it’s a problem that I’m not sure I can deal with anymore. His illness has not been named or diagnosed and there are no medications or therapy sessions. But it’s true and I have to come to terms with this reality. There, I’ve said it. It has been released from my heart and into the stratosphere and I don’t know what to do or say next.

Just to clarify a bit on my last post. I am not against the dawah, I still consider myself salafi, I am not against scholars or scholarship. But I just don’t understand a few points:

Where are our communities? If there are viable, working productive communities out there please a comment, because I’m sure most of us want and need to know where they are.

Why did the Prophet (saw) refuse to name or attack the hypocrites who existed amongst the companions? “I would not want my enemies to say, Muhammad kills his own followers.” The personal attacks and slander campaigns of muslims who were trying to spread the dawah has done nothing but kill our unity and destroy our effectiveness as a dawah, has it not?

If I have to fight everyday to wear hijab, pray in public and homeschool my kids, why did we not all fight collectively to keep our communities together. People sacrificed so much to build these centers and masjids, weren’t they worth fighting for?

On a communal scale as well as a global one, we have let each other down. We have shown that all we can do as an ummah is hide our heads in the sand. I seriously do not see what good came from it all. Do you?

My people are in pain. We have been hurting for so long it makes you wonder… will we ever heal? It used to be us against the world. We were envied, respected, talked about and joined. Now we just grieve.

I became Muslim when I was 20 years old. I had searched the globosphere of religion and belief and stumbled upon my greatest love…Islam. I was fortunate to read and study the Quran and SahihBukhari before I ever entered a masjid. I bought book, after book and for two glorious years was not tainted in my perspective by any group, sect or party. I was in love, I never wanted to be anything else except Allah’s maidservant and a champion of my people.

Then I became salafi.

The salafidawah echoed what I believed, worship Allah according to his book the Quran and the statements of the prophet muhammad, and the righteous community that followed after him who practiced the same. We were taught to be studious (which in turn became our downfall) to hear and obey, and to emulate the righteous in our dress, attitudes and worship.

I still believe in that way. But salafiyyah (the practitioners of it) failed me.

Just when I thought we were strong, just when I thought we were upon greatness, we were struck down from beneath. The very issues that we were taught to avoid were the very things we fell into and suffered because of.

Backbiting, tale-carrying, spying: Allah forbid us from this in surahal–hujurat. Khatibs and Imams extolled to us the evils of this practice from the minbars weekly. Yet, a group sprung up amongst us, claiming to be of us, and the backbit and slandered and spied on until all of the trust of one muslim for another was destroyed.

Enmity, envy and lust for leadership: “and protect us from the evil of the envier when he envies.” Everybody wanted to be an Imam, a scholar. Giving beneficial, religious lectures had started to be called “rocking the mic”, “blacking-out” and “cutting-up.” Everyone wanted to hold an audience, give a class, run a masjid, lead a community until the Imams who had been given this responsibility, were slandered, threatened and defamed. New masjid began to spring up and older, established masajid that had been pillars of the community, were abandoned and boycotted.

Splitting, division and abandonment: Masajid were abandoned and children pulled out of their schools, friendships were dissolved and families destroyed as a result. Distrust, suspicion and labeling ate away at our communities until nothing was left except a naked, exposed and putrid shell of what it used to be.

Blind Following: The new era of “the sheikh said” arose. Verses of the quran and statements of the prophet were left off for “but the sheikh said”. Our ummah was split into sections: scholars, students-of-knowledge, and laymen. The word laymen meant everybody who was too ignorant to understand the religion so were relegated to the statements and advice of the previous two categories. And with that, no matter how many years you had been Muslim, no matter if you understood the arabic language, tajweed or had memorized various sections of the quran, you could only be entered into the land of the knowledgeable by a select process that to the date of this writing has still not been made known.

So today, we are left with flailing communities that struggle to remain. Distrustful Muslims who either stay to themselves, neither benefiting or being benefited or hunt out the mistakes of every other Muslim in order to debase and defame them and push them into isolation. And in the meantime, our people are being killed, imprisoned, raped and murdered in almost every other country in the world. And we are so busy destroying ourselves that we can be of no help to anyone else. My ummah, My ummah! Will we ever be able to heal?

Well, I tried not to do it. I said I wouldn’t. I was content with just being a vouyuer if you will (is that how you spell it?). But the idea pulled and tugged at me until I gave in. Here I am. Standing at the gates (wondering how and why I am here). I am officially BLOGGING!!! Woo Hoo…. So now what?

A little about me I guess. I am a mother of 6, married (been meaning to get that “I married a lug nut” t-shirt made) and muslim, not in that order. My life is really not that interesting (which is probably why I’m blogging). But we have our moments.

I am (excuse me while I puke) american. I converted to islam when I was 21. Definetely the best choice I ever made. I have traveled to many different places and still not reached the place I’d like to be. I have a teenaged daughter, 4 sons and a little princess who thinks she’s 35. All names will be changed in this blog to protect the innocent, prevent lawsuits and basically not embarrass my husband who would probably kill me if anyone knew who we really are.

Stay tuned, maybe someone out there will benefit from my meager efforts…